Was at work when I posted my initial comment so couldn't expand as much as I wanted to but I want to give a big thanks to @Hells Warrrior aka Craig for being an amazing guy who literally saved this site and also a joy to game with. I genuinely have a lot of love and respect for you. I would also like to shout out @Covert Gunman who was a great friend to me for a few years while I was more active. You're a great guy Nick. Loved gaming with you and hope to do so again in the near future.
I also wish to thank Shawn @Flammenwerfer for being a cool guy with the most sexual voice. @InfestLithium for being a handsome bastard (your selfies on Facebook are awesome!) @GRILLfor being a beer drinking legend and @Chopper for getting me a mod status on here and also for being a mentor and overall legend in this scene.
I love you all and miss being a contributor. This forum helped me out so much during a dark period in my life that I won't bother you all with the details. I love having you all as friends on Facebook and I'm glad that we still interact beyond this site. I hope to be more active in the future and look forward to CoD2018. Its great to see so many folks keeping this site alive after all these years. Big shout out to @anonymous for sticking it out. Love you dude!
Last but not least, I want to give a shout out to Milo @MrRoflWaffles for not selling out and continuing to be a no frills, no sell out community member who genuinely cares about the game-mode and is passionate about zombies regardless of revenue. You're a genuine legend.

I'm still around, lurking in the shadows but decided to take a back seat during the IW Zombies era and skipped WWII Zombies altogether so as to avoid burning myself out again and to stay fresh for the next Treyarch outing. Its my own fault really. I hit custom zombies hard and it killed the game-mode for me. BO3 was also a big letdown for me. No real innovation except for the micro transaction inspired GG's and the overall kid mode feel to the game-mode in general. I also found the map design to be poor on most maps. IW Zombies was promising but I never bought any of the DLC as they all looked pretty lame tbh.
I'll be around for the next game though, regardless of whether its good or not because I'm a sucker for Treyarch zombies. I sincerely hope that Treyarch actually try to be bold and innovative this time around though. I don't want every map to be inspired by MotD & Origins with the same perks across the board. Maps need to feel unique and different like the BO2 maps. Give them all their own identity and unique features.
Anyway... Moderator or not I'm still here and always will be. Just need Treyarch to give me a reason to want to invest my spare time in discussing their game. I want to be passionate again and hope that can be the case this coming season.

Hey dude! I remember you from the ATVI forums lol. The MLG_EPICzZzZzZz username was hard to forget. Unfortunately I haven't been as active as I used to be due to working extremely punishing hours but I have to for now at least so gaming has pretty much been non existent. I have however managed to have it all pay off finally over the last 2 years of hard graft as I have been given a promotion with more money and less hours. Absolutely delighted! Took some effort to get there though lol.
Anyway, with that in mind I will hopefully be able to start gaming a bit more. Absolutely choking to get a high round solo run on Origins & Moon on Chronicles. Got to 100 on both maps and would like to try for 150 on the newer, easier versions. You should see me on here a bit for often as well, and I do post on Reddit a bit. Really pumped for WWII Nazi Zombies as well. The trailer really does have a ridiculously terrifying vibe to it that I feel BO3 completely lacked though I do still play it so it ain't all bad.
Glad to have you around. :)

I'm not sure about it dying exactly. I mean, with Infinite Warfare having a zombie mode now it seems to be very much alive but the game-mode itself has evolved into a child friendly, clutch ridden mess when compared to the WaW/BO1 days. Micro-transactions now play a major role, offering kids and idiots with money the chance to gamble with RNG mechanics in the hope of making an easy game-mode easier. Earning LD in-game is a slow process designed to temp the player into parting with their cash, especially when the developers decide to abandon the creation of new perk machines and lock many possible perk ideas behind the gumballs instead.
The whole game-mode aspect has changed as well. BO3 zombies is ridiculously easy and that is one of the reasons I gave up playing. There is no challenge for the skilled veterans. I got to round 88 on my first solo game of Revelations and haven't played it since. The normally replayable EE's from older games have been replaced with these unrewarding and ultimately kinda pointless EE's that aren't even that fun to do. Zombies for me has become a YouTube friendly game-mode now being marketed exclusively for a young audience and I can't see it ever reverting back so I can't see me getting back into it. Gave IW zombies a try but after playing the first map I'm not investing in any of the DLC. Will see what Sledgehammer can come up with before passing judgement on their next attempt.

This pretty much sums it up for me. I personally loved Tranzit at first and even now have very fond memories of it. It was a wasted opportunity though at the end of the day. The map itself was fantastic and very well laid out but the features within the map let it down badly and I put that down to limitations. If Tranzit came out on BO3 instead I think it would have had much more content and could have easily been one of the best zombie maps ever.
As for the term 'Transhit', I hate it and I disregard the opinion of those who use it. I respect what they tried to do with it even if it failed to meet expectations.

I've already spoke to you privately regarding this and have told you I feel the same but while also feeling burnt out and deflated with zombies I have had a several month break from playing regularly but recently while having a bit of spare time in my busy working life I have started playing again here and there and while doing some solo high round strata on a few maps I have started to feel the spark again so I don't want to leave the scene quite yet.
Maybe I just played zombies too much and got burned out on the whole thing but after a long break I can feel the passion creeping back in. I know I will never be able to pump in the same kind of time I once did but I definitely feel the itch to play again and I'm going to try and get involved again. Time will tell if my feelings are short lived or not but I will percivere nonetheless.
Just wish the mode wasn't laden in micro-transactions but I will try to look past it and see what happens. Either way, let's get some games in bud and see what happens.

I've been logging on daily to trade out some poorer GG's but I'm still not a big fan of it because of my dislike for the GG's in general. It's still a neat addition though. Would have preferred an alternative game-mode though.

You already know I echo those sentiments Craig. Black Ops 3 zombies was a massive let down for me as a whole. The story and attempts at answering many past mysteries was a disgrace to this great community who helped mold it. They would have been better left unanswered if you ask me. The direction the storyline went with BO3 was also a bizzare and nonsensical route. The finale was a real shame.
The problem when it came to gameplay was the lack of evolution in the series. If you have played since WaW then the games have just become progressively easier as each one drops. They seem reluctant to try and expand upon the basic core game style for veterans to get a new challenge and that has unfortunately made the series become tired. Their attempts to divert this tired style was to introduce annoying, random side quests that barely reward the efforts. Now we are getting zombies every season it is going to continue to lose it's charm (for me).
I don't want to say never but I won't be buying Infinite Warfare on release or anytime soon after. I would only have been buying it for zombies and after seeing gameplay for ZiS I just ain't interested in splashing 50 bucks on a game just for 1 map that looks fun but offers very little difference from what I've been playing for 8 years now.

The idea of the Gobble Gums was not necessarily a bad one but the way the were incorporated was extremely poor. What should have been a nice little twist on the persistent perk idea was not. The normal free GG's included some really neat ones that work well as temporary effects vs. the core mechanics like the Danger Closest. It replaces the apparently over powered PHD Flopper and by only being a 3 round limit it makes the idea or running with explosive weapons more risky adding a more difficult balance to the game play but these free GG's were just a face for the more ridiculously over powered and kiddie candy ones that were obviously aimed at the easily manipulated children who's parents have disposable incomes.
The effects that some of the mega GG's have are literally game changing and not in a good way. They're no different to things like the bank in BO2, allowing players to get set up very early in a game with minimum effort on what is already a series of extremely easy and ultimately boring maps. Even the good maps are ruined by being too easy and these gumballs just make it beyond stupid. Day one on most maps and people are registering round 100+. Terrible.
Now, some people can and have said "Well you can just not use them you know." and this is true but this is not the reason I dislike them, well... not the main reason. For me it's the fact that they had a very interesting mechanic available that they could have used well to add difficulty to the game, especially if it meant the sacrifice of things like additional perk machines but they didn't make them with that purpose otherwise they would have kept them balanced and not included the OP ones. The addition of the more balanced ones were just to make it look that way. You should NEVER have had perkaholic as a GG or a few of the ones listed in the OP. They're only in there to make people buy LD. If you didn't have OP ones them people would be less inclined to want to pay real money over farming LD in-game.
I stopped playing MP in CoD because it was no longer about running and gunning but about investing cash for loadouts. The fact that RNG was involved meant you could invest a hundreds of bucks and still never get what you actually want. I will never play CoD MP again now and already barely touch zombies. I will definitely get IW for the stock zombie maps even though I know it is going to be micro-transaction laden but if it ends up being poor then I will not be touching the DLC. Mod tools are the only reason BO3 has not been a complete disaster in my eyes.

This "super EE" thing all started gaining traction because Decrypter Fixer over on Reddit said it existed. That being said, this is the guy who led the community on a wild goose chase to upgrade the Apothicon Servant on Shadows of Evil, saying it was definitely upgradable only to then claim the steps had their triggers removed later on but that they were continuously adding new steps in via updates that would allow it to be upgradable on a later date, which it wasn't and probably never will.
This is also the guy who claimed he doesn't want attention but would then make suggestive posts daily before having an apparent meltdown and deleted his reddit account only to make another one within a few weeks which he has again since deleted recently yet within ONE DAY he then posts multiple videos on Youtube trying to suggest they are hints towards this apparent super EE.
Even if the super EE exists, this guy definitely comes across as an attention seeker. He can deny it all he wants but his behaviour has all the hallmarks of someone desperate for the attention he gets. If you're gonna delete your account and leave then just do it. Don't make a rant post about doing it (on at least 2 occasions) only to then make videos knowing they will make their way over to reddit and other outlets if you want to be left alone.
All of the recent reddit troubles are because of this guy. He has basically done what PlayTheGame did during BO2... gave people false hope and had them running about looking for stuff without knowing for a fact that this stuff was actually there. He also chose to spoil EE's in other maps very early into their release without consequence. Now he has people arguing and fighting over this apparent super EE again without giving actual solid evidence to it's existent, only saying stuff like "Just bloody search for it, ok!" or similar. He might be able to reverse engineer but that does not mean these triggers he finds in the code are actually a part of a cross map EE. I asked for proof of it's existence and what he sent me confirmed that there was something else that can be triggered (on SoE) but it did NOT confirm a cross map EE or an alternative ending.
Super EE or not, this guy has left a nasty taste on the BO3 season. People might think he is helping but looking at strings in the code and seeing things that are not currently know to the community does not confirm they are or ever will be usable in game. BO2 had multiple strings in the coding for features not seen or found in game but they never came to anything. I am not necessarily saying that he is wrong though but it's more the way he goes about revealing stuff. If this stuff exists and you want to tell the community then either just tell then or shut up and leave people be. 10 months later and he is still doing the same shit. Give it a week and he will be back on reddit again because he just can't seem to stay away.
Either way, I actually don't care about this game or a super EE. He has contributed greatly to this because he has went out of his way to ruin the experience for purists and he has confirmed himself multiple times that he doesn't care that he is ruining it because it's what the masses want, confirming that he is in it for the fame and attention.

Has anybody been tackling the second part of the cypher that DecrypterFixer posted over on Reddit? Sure I saw you might have been at it @oxin8 If so, apparently DF said it was actually a cypher in the code from Treyarch...